ICA AB is Sweden’s largest retail and wholesale firm, a cooperation of retail pro-prietors. It is also the nation’s largest advertiser, the largest publisher of consumer magazines, and likely the most advanced user of household shopping data for marketing purposes. Through qualitative interviewing and observations, this study follows ICA’s 2007-2008 marketing communications process and some of its most central practitioners – marketing managers, media agency specialists, editorial staff, and TV network sales representatives. It describes their involvement in TV advertising campaigns, in the customer magazine, and in the introduction of mass-customized direct marketing.
The study takes interest in how different practitioners relate to the idea of value and value creation in their work, what these ideas do to their opportunities to collaborate within ICA’s marketing processes, and what this means for the re-tailer’s attempts to manage the integration of marketing communications efforts. With the purpose of empirically describing how value forms in organizational constellations, this thesis combines marketing theories on value creation with a sociological view on activity forwarded by Practice Theory, suggesting that value is best seen as being formed along two intertwined processes – value creation which is the process of physical activity, and value construction which is a social process of shaping an understanding of what is to be regarded valuable. The find-ings firstly include a detailed mapping of how practitioners articulate the value of marketing communications, what aspects they emphasize, and how they interpret the objective of their activities. Secondly, the study identifies 16 underlying value-forming practices.
Jönköping International Business School Jönköping University
Understanding value formation
A study of marketing communications practices
at the food retailer ICA
JIBS Disser tation Series No . 064 U n d er st an d in g va lu e fo rm at io n MAR T O TS
A study of marketing communications practices at the food retailer ICA
Understanding value formation
DS
MART OTS
MART OTSICA AB is Sweden’s largest retail and wholesale firm, a cooperation of retail pro-prietors. It is also the nation’s largest advertiser, the largest publisher of consumer magazines, and likely the most advanced user of household shopping data for marketing purposes. Through qualitative interviewing and observations, this study follows ICA’s 2007-2008 marketing communications process and some of its most central practitioners – marketing managers, media agency specialists, editorial staff, and TV network sales representatives. It describes their involvement in TV advertising campaigns, in the customer magazine, and in the introduction of mass-customized direct marketing.
The study takes interest in how different practitioners relate to the idea of value and value creation in their work, what these ideas do to their opportunities to collaborate within ICA’s marketing processes, and what this means for the re-tailer’s attempts to manage the integration of marketing communications efforts. With the purpose of empirically describing how value forms in organizational constellations, this thesis combines marketing theories on value creation with a sociological view on activity forwarded by Practice Theory, suggesting that value is best seen as being formed along two intertwined processes – value creation which is the process of physical activity, and value construction which is a social process of shaping an understanding of what is to be regarded valuable. The find-ings firstly include a detailed mapping of how practitioners articulate the value of marketing communications, what aspects they emphasize, and how they interpret the objective of their activities. Secondly, the study identifies 16 underlying value-forming practices.
ISSN 1403-0470 ISBN 978-91-86345-11-2 JIBS
Jönköping International Business School Jönköping University JIBS Dissertation Series No. 064 • 2010
Understanding value formation
A study of marketing communications practices
at the food retailer ICA
JIBS Disser tation Series No . 064 U n d er st an d in g va lu e fo rm at io n MAR T O TS
A study of marketing communications practices at the food retailer ICA
Understanding value formation
DS
MART OTS
MART OTSUnderstanding value formation
A study of marketing communications practices
at the food retailer ICA
Jönköping International Business School P.O. Box 1026 SE-551 11 Jönköping Tel.: +46 36 10 10 00 E-mail: info@jibs.hj.se www.jibs.se
Understanding value formation - A study of marketing communications practices at the food retailer ICA
JIBS Dissertation Series No. 065
© 2010 Mart Ots and Jönköping International Business School
ISSN 1403-0470
ISBN 978-91-86345-11-2
Acknowledgement
Though dissertation writing is a lonely labor at times, it is far from a one-man show. First and foremost I am indebted to my dear wife who has put as much work as I have into making this book come about. Thank you Emma, and let us choose a different kind of life-project next time, shall we?
Some people refer to their dissertation as their baby, but I am fully content with our two lovely daughters that we have been blessed with during my years as a doctoral candidate. Siri and Stina have helped me to keep both feet on the ground during periods of way too abstract thinking. Besides, I think they have catchier names than ‘Understanding value formation’.
I would also like to express my sincerest thanks to Helén Anderson and Karl Erik Gustafsson, who besides having guided me in the academic world, have read, re-read, and discussed numerous drafts of the chapters in this book. I feel fortunate to have had such engaged and constructive supervisors. You have also proved to have the people-skills to be critical when I needed to be challenged and encouraging when I needed moral support. I believe that is the best type of mentorship a doctoral candidate can ask for.
Doing interviews and observations has the advantage that you get to meet many interesting people. In particular I feel a need to extend my gratitude to Magnus Wikner, Tobias Karlsson and colleagues at ICA, and Jochum Forsell and colleagues at IUM, for opening up your minds and workplaces with such enthusiasm. The openness to academic research that ICA has shown has been a key factor in making this study possible.
In between rounds of data collection, I have been fortunate to get some time away to write, reflect, and get new perspectives on what I am doing. Thank you Bobby Calder and Ed Malthouse at Northwestern University, Steve Wildman at Michigan State University, Phil Napoli at Fordham University, and all your colleagues for the valuable advice, inspiration, friendship, and for providing transatlantic refuges for me at your institutions.
Thank you to my final seminar discussant Per Skålén at Karlstad University, as well as Jonas Gunnarsson at ICA, Jenny Helin, Benjamin Hartmann, Benedikte Borgström, and Leif Melin at Jönköping International Business School for reading and providing constructive comments on various versions of my manuscript. And of course all my present and former colleagues at the Media Management and Transformation Centre and the (former) department of Entrepreneurship, Marketing and Management for making my time in Jönköping a good one.
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A special word of gratitude goes to the Hamrin Foundation and the Hedelius Foundation for the financial support that made this dissertation study possible.
Jönköping, 19 April 2010 Mart Ots
Abstract
ICA AB is Sweden’s largest retail and wholesale firm, a cooperation of retail proprietors. Here it is studied as the nation’s largest media firm. It is the largest advertiser, the largest publisher of consumer magazines, and plausibly the most advanced user of household shopping data for marketing purposes. ICA’s marketing media system is operated by a constellation of different professional groups, and the study at hand asks questions about how practitioners in different professional communities relate to the idea of value and value creation, how their social practices pushes them towards divergent understandings and priorities, and what such differences do to their opportunities to collaborate within ICA’s marketing processes.
We are all ‘practitioners’ in the sense that we go about our daily lives conducting various practices that create value for ourselves and for others. We act in routinized fashions surrounded by social codes that guides us in how to combine and integrate tools, skills and products in different combinations. Since they seem to capture the very purpose of marketing, ‘value’ and ‘value creation’ are concepts which long have been central to the academic debate. However, if our value-creating practices are guided by social codes, this has consequences for marketers and marketing that has been largely left aside in the mainstream marketing theory.
Over two years, 2007-2008, through qualitative interviewing and participant observation, the study follows ICA’s marketing communications process and some of its most central practitioners – marketing managers, media agency specialists, editorial staff, and TV network sales representatives. It describes their involvement in TV advertising campaigns, in the customer magazine Buffé, and in the introduction of mass-customized direct marketing in the project Mina varor.
Combining some of the most widely cited marketing theories on value creation with a sociological view on activity forwarded by Practice Theory, this thesis suggests that value is best seen as being formed along two intertwined processes – value creation which is the process of physical activity, and value construction which is a social process of understanding what is to be regarded valuable. The findings provide firstly a detailed mapping of how practitioners articulate marketing communications value, what aspects they emphasize, and how they interpret the objective of their practices. Secondly, the study links the articulations of value to 16 value-forming marketing communications practices. Marketing managers, media agency specialists, editorial staff, and TV network sales representatives are all described as acting according to a ‘practical logic’ of their respective professional communities. These logics combine practices for
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marketing communications production, for mutual interaction, and for valuation of processes, products and outcomes.
The benefits of coordination and collaboration have been forwarded in marketing (relationships and networks) and marketing communications (integrated marketing communications) literature over the past decades. The concluding discussion concerns how and to which extent practical logics can be altered, changed, or aligned towards mutually rewarding goals. In other words, how can two parties work together if they have divergent understandings of value, and conversely how can two parties learn to understand value by working together? It thereby puts focus on marketing communications management, and contrary to many textbooks in the field, this study does not describe marketing communications as a de-humanized instrument in the marketer’s toolbox, but as a challenge of coordinating practitioners, practices, and understandings.
Content
1 Introduction ... 1
1.1 Professionals, Practitioners, Stay-at-Home-Parents, and the Practical logic of value ... 1
1.2 Is value determined by humans or by Microsoft Excel? ... 3
1.3 An advertising market view on a marketing communications problem ... 4
1.4 Research objective ... 8
1.5 Outline of the thesis ... 10
2 Methodology ... 13
2.1 Research Strategy ... 13
2.1.1 (Re-)Interpreting media valuation practices ... 13
2.1.2 The case study approach ... 13
2.1.3 Generating answers from cases ... 15
2.1.4 Studying people in their practices ... 16
2.1.5 Structuring research to understand practices ... 22
2.2 Research design ... 23
2.2.1 Choosing ICA as research site ... 24
2.2.2 The single case – scope and delimitations ... 24
2.2.3 Selecting in-cases ... 25
2.2.4 Fieldwork – getting access ... 27
2.2.5 Fieldwork – collecting the data ... 28
2.2.6 What data to collect ... 29
2.2.7 Secondary data... 29
2.2.8 Primary data collection – interviews and observations... 30
2.3 Coding, interpretation and analysis ... 32
2.3.1 The coding process ... 32
2.3.2 Analyzing the data ... 33
3 Value formation in marketing literature ... 37
3.1 Introducing value creation ... 37
3.2 Value-in-exchange and value-in-use ... 38
3.3 Historical view on value in marketing... 39
3.4 Research on customer value creation and customer value perceptions ... 40
3.5 Value creation as configuration of resources ... 41
3.5.1 How value is created ... 42
3.5.2 How value is understood in a resource-based view ... 44
3.5.3 The resource-based view through a social lens ... 45
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3.6.1 Means-end theory and higher order goals ... 47
3.6.2 The cognitive stream through a social lens ... 49
3.7 Value in market practices – the interpretive view ... 50
3.7.1 Understanding market practices ... 51
3.7.2 Understanding practices in organizational communities and constellations ... 52
3.7.3 Consumption work as value-creating practice ... 53
3.8 A marketing-theoretical point of departure ... 54
4 Value in advertising theory ... 57
4.1 Introduction to advertising media planning and purchasing ... 57
4.2 Academic theories on the value of audiences ... 59
4.2.1 Audience quantity ... 59
4.2.2 Audience demographics ... 60
4.2.3 Psychographics and purchasing data ... 62
4.3 Academic theories on the value of media vehicles and contextual effects ... 62
4.3.1 The quality of media vehicles ... 63
4.3.2 The medium: Media source effects ... 63
4.3.3 The value of the media content ... 64
4.3.4 Media appropriateness and consumers’ involvement in purchasing decision ... 65
4.3.5 The value of media brand cues ... 65
4.3.6 Synergies from communication coordination and integration ... 66
4.4 Practitioners’ understandings of TV advertising value ... 67
4.4.1 The use of theoretical models ... 67
4.4.2 Cognitive assessments of value in agency and client media decisions ... 68
4.4.3 Understanding value in mass media advertising ... 69
4.5 History and background of Customer Relationship Management ... 70
4.5.1 The value of CRM in academic theory... 71
4.5.2 Practitioners’ understandings of CRM value ... 72
4.6 Customer media and Custom publishing ... 73
4.6.1 The value of Customer media in academic theory ... 74
4.6.2 Practitioners’ understandings of Customer media value ... 74
4.7 The social side of advertising – studies of practitioners in interaction ... 75
4.7.1 (The lack of) collaboration in agency-advertiser relationships ... 76
4.7.2 Relationship value in media agencies and media firms ... 78
4.7.3 Information in media planning decisions ... 79
4.8 The meaning of value in marketing communications work ... 80
5 Marketing communications at ICA ... 83
5.1 Getting to know ICA ... 83
5.1.1 ICA AB – ownership structures ... 84
5.1.2 The story of ICA Sverige in brief ... 85
5.1.4 Marketing communications decision-making structures at ICA ... 89
5.1.5 Marketing philosophies at ICA – co-op advertising and branding-by-selling ... 92
6 The case of TV advertising ... 97
6.1 ICA’s brand strategy and creative concept ... 97
6.1.1 New creative concepts and executions ... 98
6.1.2 The scenario starting 2007 ... 101
6.2 National communications planning – processes and practitioners ... 102
6.2.1 Phase 1: National communications planning (January-June 2007) ... 105
6.2.2 Phase 2: Budgeting and detailed planning (June-September 2007) ... 108
6.2.3 Phase 3: Operationalization and execution (October 2007 – December 2008) ... 110
6.2.4 The creative development process ... 111
6.2.5 The media planning process ... 114
6.2.6 The final TV plan ... 118
6.2.7 Preparing for negotiations with TV channels ... 119
6.2.8 Media negotiations ... 122
6.2.9 Buying and placing the ads ... 124
6.2.10 Evaluation of communication efforts ... 126
7 Custom publishing and the case of the magazine Buffé ... 129
7.1 The story of Buffé ... 129
7.2 The launch decision ... 130
7.3 The objectives ... 132
7.4 The operations ... 133
7.5 The 2007 planning and production process ... 135
7.6 The 2008 production and evaluation process ... 137
7.7 Assessment of costs and benefits ... 139
8 CRM, database marketing and the case of personalized offerings ... 141
8.1 The story of CRM and loyalty cards at ICA ... 141
8.1.1 1990: Loyalty club – a growing interest in the value of customer loyalty ... 142
8.1.2 1996: The bonus system – how customer data was accumulated ... 144
8.1.3 2000: Loyalty efforts after the bonus system – market places and lost loyalty ... 145
8.2 Turning customer data into one-to-one communication ... 147
8.2.1 The technical delivery solution ... 149
8.2.2 Starting the project – technical infrastructure ... 150
8.2.3 The need for efficient supplier communication ... 151
8.2.4 Experiences from testing the system ... 152
8.3 The value idea for ICA AB ... 154
8.3.1 Communicating value ... 155
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8.3.3 From sales promotion to media house services ... 159
8.3.4 The customers, the news media, and the public debate ... 160
9 How practitioners articulate the value of using advertising media ... 163
9.1 Introduction to analysis ... 163
9.2 Capturing understandings ... 165
9.3 General categories of value ... 167
9.3.1 Effect & output ... 168
9.3.2 Intraorganizational value ... 169
9.3.3 Relationship value ... 169
9.3.4 Process value ... 169
9.3.5 Audience value ... 170
9.3.6 Media vehicle value ... 170
9.3.7 Financial/monetary value ... 171
9.4 Comparison of value categories with prior studies ... 171
9.5 Articulations of value: Themes in TV advertising ... 172
9.5.1 Effect and output themes in TV advertising ... 173
9.5.2 Intraorganizational value themes in TV advertising ... 176
9.5.3 Relationship value themes in TV advertising ... 178
9.5.4 Process value themes in TV advertising ... 181
9.5.5 Audience value themes in TV advertising ... 184
9.5.6 Media vehicle value themes in TV advertising ... 185
9.5.7 Financial/Monetary value themes in TV advertising ... 187
9.6 Articulations of value: Themes in Custom publishing ... 189
9.6.1 Effect and output themes in Custom publishing... 190
9.6.2 Intraorganizational value themes in Custom publishing ... 191
9.6.3 Relationship value themes in Custom publishing ... 192
9.6.4 Process value themes in Custom publishing ... 194
9.6.5 Audience value themes in Custom publishing ... 195
9.6.6 Media vehicle value themes in Custom publishing... 196
9.6.7 Financial/Monetary value themes in Custom publishing... 197
9.7 Articulations of value: Themes in CRM ... 197
9.7.1 Effect and output themes in CRM ... 198
9.7.2 Intraorganizational value themes in CRM ... 199
9.7.3 Relationship value themes in CRM ... 200
9.7.4 Process value themes in CRM ... 201
9.7.5 Media vehicle and audience value themes in CRM ... 202
9.7.6 Financial and monetary value themes in CRM ... 204
9.8 Comparison of articulated value across cases and practices ... 205
9.8.1 Understandings in marketing management practice ... 206
9.8.2 Understandings in media agency practice ... 206
9.8.3 Understandings in TV advertising sales and editorial practice ... 207
10 The practical logic of value ... 209
10.1 Paths of value construction – interaction, valuation and production ... 209
10.2 Introducing the Practical Logic of Value as a typology of value forming practices ... 210
10.2.1 Production practices ... 212
10.2.2 Interaction practices ... 216
10.2.3 Valuation practices ... 221
10.3 Practical logics in the studied cases ... 225
10.4 TV advertising practices ... 226
10.4.1 TV advertising production practices – marketing managers... 227
10.4.2 TV production practices – media agency specialists ... 227
10.4.3 TV advertising production practices – TV network representatives .. 229
10.4.4 TV advertising interaction practices ... 229
10.4.5 TV advertising valuation practices ... 231
10.4.6 Three practical logics in TV advertising ... 232
10.4.7 The dynamics of value formation in TV advertising ... 234
10.5 Custom publishing practices ... 236
10.5.1 Custom publishing production practices – editorial staff ... 237
10.5.2 Custom publishing production practices – marketing managers ... 238
10.5.3 Custom publishing interaction practice ... 238
10.5.4 Custom publishing valuation practice ... 240
10.5.5 Two practical logics in custom publishing ... 240
10.5.6 The dynamics of value formation – Custom publishing ... 242
10.6 The CRM case ... 244
10.6.1 CRM production practice ... 245
10.6.2 CRM interaction practices ... 246
10.6.3 CRM valuation practice ... 247
10.6.4 The practical logic in CRM ... 248
10.6.5 The dynamics of value formation – CRM ... 248
10.7 Marketing management and intervention in value formation processes .. 250
11 Conclusions ... 255
11.1 On marketing communications practices and related theoretical discussions ... 255
11.2 The Practical Logic of Value – an empirically derived constellation of organizational value-forming practices ... 257
11.3 A relativistic view on value creation ... 261
11.3.1 Value creation and construction as co-constitutive processes ... 262
11.3.2 Implications for the management of value formation ... 263
11.3.3 Searching for consistency among a multitude of practices ... 265
11.4 The problem of integrating marketing communications ... 266
11.5 Limitations and future research ... 269
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Appendix A. Interviews and observations ... 292
Appendix B. ICA’s national marketing organization 2007 ... 295
JIBS Dissertation Series ... 297
Figures
Figure 1 An advertising market constellation... 6Figure 2 Value formation, creation and construction ... 9
Figure 3 Scope and delimitation of case ... 26
Figure 4 A time-line of the study ... 29
Figure 5 Number of Swedish grocery stores 1950-2000 ... 86
Figure 6 A description of ICA’s four store formats ... 87
Figure 7 The Swedish retail market 2006 (shares %)... 87
Figure 8 ICA’s advertising media mix 2005 ... 89
Figure 9 The ICA private label ... 93
Figure 10 Private labels ... 97
Figure 11 Stig and his shop assistants ... 98
Figure 12 ICA TV advertisement, 1996 ... 99
Figure 13 ICA TV advertisement, 2003 ... 99
Figure 14 The return of Stig... 101
Figure 15 Overview of ICA’s communications planning process ... 103
Figure 16 The marketing communications planning process, phase 1 ... 107
Figure 17 The communications planning process, phase 1 & 2 ... 109
Figure 18 The marketing communications planning process phase 3: Creative development ... 111
Figure 19 Can you make a little cabbage tart? Outdoor execution of the home-cooking campaign ... 112
Figure 20 Cookbook logo... 112
Figure 21 ICA’s ecological products ... 113
Figure 22 Marketing communications planning process phase 3: The media planning process ... 115
Figure 23 The customer magazine Buffé ... 129
Figure 24 A timeline of customer magazine planning and production ... 136
Figure 25 Customer magazine production and evaluation ... 137
Figure 26 Brand associations of Buffé (% of respondents) ... 138
Figure 27 Emotional responses to Buffé (% of respondents) ... 138
Figure 28 An example of ICA’s personalized direct mail ... 142
Figure 29 A timeline of ICA’s CRM development ... 143
Figure 30 A media-neutral delivery solution ... 149
Figure 31 Co-op advertising in the 1960’s ... 156
Figure 32 Communities of practice in ICA’s media planning processes ... 164
Figure 34 Structure of analysis – chapter 9 ... 166
Figure 35 Seven general categories of value ... 168
Figure 36 Three practice types ... 211
Figure 37 Production practices ... 213
Figure 38 Interaction practices ... 217
Figure 39 Valuation practices ... 222
Figure 40 Overlapping TV network and media agency practices ... 232
Figure 41 Advertiser and media agency practices ... 234
Figure 42 Practical logic of value in custom publishing – editorial staff ... 241
Figure 43 Practical logic of value in custom publishing – marketing management ... 242
Figure 44 Creating a shared valuation practice ... 244
Figure 45 Practical logic of value in CRM ... 248
Tables
Table 1 Key figures for ICA AB’s four divisions ... 84Table 2 Top 15 buyers of advertising media 2006 (thousand SEK) ... 88
Table 3 Marketing communications decision-making structures at ICA ... 90
Table 4 TV-campaign targets during the ‘I love eco’-theme ... 119
Table 5 TV channels and audience shares of total TV population (nov. 2007) ... 120
Table 6 Purchased specifics during the I love eco-campaign, week 13 ... 125
Table 7 Value categories in TV planning ... 173
Table 8 Effect and output themes in TV advertising ... 174
Table 9 Intraorganizational value themes in TV advertising ... 177
Table 10 Relationship value themes in TV advertising ... 178
Table 11 Process value themes in TV advertising ... 181
Table 12 Audience value themes in TV advertising ... 184
Table 13 Media vehicle value themes in TV advertising ... 185
Table 14 Financial value themes in TV advertising ... 188
Table 15 Value categories – custom publishing ... 189
Table 16 Effect and output themes – Custom publishing ... 190
Table 17 Intraorganizational value themes – Custom Publishing ... 192
Table 18 Relationship value themes – Custom publishing... 193
Table 19 Process value themes – Custom publishing ... 194
Table 20 Audience value themes – Custom publishing ... 195
Table 21 Media vehicle value themes – Custom publishing ... 196
Table 22 Financial/monetary value themes – Custom publishing ... 197
Table 23 Value categories – CRM ... 198
Table 24 Effect and output themes - CRM ... 199
Table 25 Intraorganizational value themes - CRM ... 200
Table 26 Relationship value themes - CRM ... 201
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Table 28 Audience value themes - CRM ... 202
Table 29 Media vehicle value themes - CRM ... 203
Table 30 Financial/monetary value themes - CRM ... 204
Table 31 Cross-case comparison of marketing managers’ articulations of value ... 206
Table 32 Media agency articulations of value ... 207
1
Introduction
1.1 Professionals, Practitioners,
Stay-at-Home-Parents, and the Practical logic of
value
When asked what my thesis is about, I have used three standard answers. In the broadest sense, you can read this as a description of ICA, Sweden’s largest retailer, and some of its most well-known marketing communication channels – TV advertising, the customer magazine Buffé, and the one-to-one marketing project ‘Mina Varor’ (My Goods). Working to my advantage at various social gatherings, I have noticed that almost every Swedish individual, adult or child, have a quite vivid relationship with ICA. No wonder really, since besides controlling close to 50% of the grocery market, ICA has also held a high profile in the media landscape counting the highest gross expenditures on traditional advertising media, receiving numerous creative awards for their advertising campaigns, being publisher of the largest consumer magazine, and having more than 2 million cardholders connected to its loyalty program in a country of 5 million households. Over two years, 2007 and 2008, I followed and documented the work done by ICA together with its suppliers and consultants in the media and advertising industries. So if you ever have wondered what goes on behind the scenes when one of the large players plan its advertising campaigns, then this book has some sections for you.
For those more specifically interested in advertising and media planning, the book investigates an advertising market problem. It presents an illustration of how marketing managers, media planners, and other practitioners involved in a large-scale media planning process value advertising media in quite different ways. Considering the in-built ambiguity of the word ‘value’ this may not come as a surprise, but in a global multi-billion dollar industry that often discusses advertising media value as factual knowledge, ‘cost-per-thousand’, ‘reach’ and ‘target ratings points’, the proposition that value comes in different forms and shapes raises some questions. Standing in the midst of a revolution of digital and social media as advertising platforms, the question is perhaps more timely than ever – what do such differences in understanding do for how advertising campaigns are managed and which media choices are eventually made? This book may help you understand such processes in a new way.
Every once in a while, I get to talk about the full scope of my study. Typically, it involves someone who has a theoretical interest in either marketing or sociology, or both. Whereas this thesis indeed is an exploration of
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advertising practitioners’ understandings of value, the real mission is to show how ‘value’ in a more general sense is a process of understanding fostered in a social context. From this viewpoint, value is not based on scientific facts, market laws, or laws of nature, but on interpretations made by people trying to do a good every-day job at their firms, get an occasional pat on the shoulder by their boss and maybe a bonus at Christmas. I find it convenient to think of value as ‘socially constructed desires, preferences, or satisfactions’ for or from something – a feeling of liking, choosing, or prioritizing some things ahead of other. However, it is important for this study that both our preferences for, and experiences of benefit and gratification, are integrated in how we understand the tasks we perform and their purpose. The thesis tries to describe and interpret such a process.
‘Practice’ is a sociological term that includes the act of doing something as well as the purpose and meaning of doing it. Our lives and professions are filled with such socially acquired schemas. In their seemingly mundane practices, an advertising practitioner, just like a student, a dentist, or a stay-at-home-parent, both invents and manifests the value(s) associated with the products they use, the experiences they gain, and the outcomes they achieve. A student might value ‘getting a good grade’ and ‘having a good time’, a dentist might value ‘happy customers’ and ‘high revenue’, and a stay-at-home-parent might value ‘time with the kids’. Each one behaves in ways that supports and re-produces their understandings of value. What advertising professionals value when it comes to advertising media is discussed at length in later chapters, but importantly these preferences are not conscious choices – they come bundled along with the practices and the roles we perform.
Albeit the advertising industry is a quite specific context, I want to believe that the same reasoning can be applied to many a variety of settings. In fact I will argue that professional communities, or ‘communities of practice’ as they are called here, are not fundamentally different from consumer subcultures, and that the act of purchasing advertising media has many similarities to for example buying a pair of jeans. Just as a teenager’s valuation of jeans often is marked by the social group of identification, professional buyers of commercial airtime on TV, customer magazines, and one-to-one marketing systems, value these advertising media according to the norms and procedures in their respective professional communities.
Within each community of practice, certain priorities and objectives make perfect sense, and appear seemingly logical. This understanding, which is constructed and enacted through daily routines, is what is here introduced as the ‘practical logic of value’. So if we really want to forward our understanding of value creation processes, then we need to explore how communities of practitioners – in this study consisting of marketing managers, media agency specialists, TV network sales representatives, magazine editors and other stakeholders involved in the communications campaigns at the food retailer ICA – act and think in practice.
Introduction
1.2 Is value determined by humans or by
Microsoft Excel?
The idea of this study originates in my own professional background in what is called the new media. The question how we decide on what is valuable was actualized when I some years ago talked to a friend who was managing the marketing and sales operations of a New York-based internet company specializing in online streaming video. He believed that the innovativeness in advertising techniques and formats of his firm provided increased benefits for advertisers, yet his advertising products proved difficult to sell. Each prospective advertising client was represented by a media agency, and at each media agency he visited, he met a junior planner who gave him different versions of the same argument: ‘In my job as a planner I use an Excel sheet to distribute the budget where I get the most value for the money. Unfortunately there are no pre-programmed slots for in my Excel spreadsheet that fits your offering.’ Obviously, any illusion that it was ‘advertiser benefits’ alone that determined the value of advertising media was shattered. In addition, it appeared that computer tools like Excel spreadsheets were sometimes more influential than human judgment in the process.
This short illustration is also part of a major shift where the underlying fundaments for traditional advertising are changing. Let me exemplify: When I grew up in the 1980’s, I used to always arrive early to the cinema. Just like other Swedes, I was living a life free from commercial broadcasting, two license-fee funded public service channels being my sole providers of TV-programming. For me, the commercials before the movie were as important for the unique cinema experience as sometimes the movie itself. So I watched, absorbed, enjoyed, and even today I recall the ads for brands some of which are not even sold today; Toy chewing gum, Timotej shampoo and Snickers chocolate bars.
Today, in 2009, the Swedish media landscape is in most respects similar to that of many other countries. For a person with endless thirst for variety, and a high enough media budget for cable subscription, access to channels is today close to infinite. Therefore, the supply of content for every taste and habit, through every channel and for every occasion, has exploded over the past decade, and most of it is in one way or another financed through our attentiveness to advertising messages. Yet, the number of hours in a day is still twenty-four, and the time we spend consuming media has not changed in any significant respect.
Today I use pop-up blockers for my internet browser, I record my favorite TV-shows and let the DVR sort out the commercial breaks, I have joined my mobile phone operators’ do-not-send-list for SMS advertisements, and I have a sticker on my mailbox declining unaddressed direct mail. So if you feel that you have changed your relationship to advertising over time, from being a willing receiver to one who makes a sport out of avoidance, then we are both part of a
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global trend of consumers who find today’s mass advertisements too many, too uninteresting and largely irrelevant to us. Still, we love our favorite brands, we enjoy receiving good, relevant advertising when we have the time and energy to digest it, and we are always up for a good bargain (Stuart, 2008).
For advertisers such change has huge implications. Placing an advertisement in TV does not have the same effect that it used to because consciously or unconsciously people neither pay attention nor react to messages the same way as they used to (Clancy & Krieg, 2006; Lee, 2006). The advertising industry has a century-long history where media, advertisers and agencies have established working procedures and conventions about how advertising media is valued. A central aspect of valuation of traditional advertising media is the so called ‘vehicle exposure model’, an assumption that media only creates value in the communication process by exposing the advertisement to consumers. Newspapers, TV broadcasters and magazines are therefore all measured, priced, and sold based upon how many people the medium reaches in different audience categories of age, gender, and geography.
Advertisers now claim that this assumed link between how large audience a medium can count, and how many of those that see, recall, or react to the inserted advertisements is seriously weakened. New measurements of media value such as ‘audience engagement’ are currently being sought (e.g. ARF 2007), and the industry claims to move in the direction of learning about consumers rather than optimizing current metrics (Rubinson 2009). Yet, in most firms business proceeds as usual and more advertising space is sold for every year in traditional channels and by traditional valuation procedures. It seems like the people who are professionally specialized in media valuation are least likely to embrace new interpretations of media value. The question that more people ask is how long valuation praxis can continue to live a life separate from advertisers’ experiences of value (Ha 1995).
1.3 An advertising market view on a
marketing communications problem
What I want to demonstrate with the examples is that practices carry assumptions that frame the meaning of value within the specific context of activity. What practitioners perceive, assess, and label as being valuable is in other words closely tied to the work routines they engage in. Along a similar line of reasoning it has been described how media firms’ adoption of new technological tools and work procedures, also makes them measure, understand, and value audiences in new ways (Napoli, Forthcoming).
In order to move ahead, I do not want to refine existing advertising planning theory. Rather I want to contribute with a new perspective on advertising media planning and marketing communications management. The
Introduction
sociology of practices (Reckwitz, 2002; Schatzki, 2001) is the choice of lens, since applying Practice theory to a market problem has the specific advantage of allowing me to study both the minds and actions of practitioners within a single framework. This opens up for new insights about the value creation activities that practitioners pursue and how they relate to their understandings about value.
A traditional advertising study might intuitively start with some variation on the a classical sender-receiver model (Shannon & Weaver, 1949). That model looks at interaction between a sender (advertiser) and receiver (consumer), where the advertisement is the stimuli that causes some kind of behavioral or cognitive effect on the consumer side. From that perspective, the goal would then be to find something more relevant than ‘exposure’ that causes consumer response. My research does however neither intend to study consumers, nor does it assume that advertisers think in terms of academic communication models when they plan advertising media. Instead, my interest resides within the business process and what people in this industry actually do when they evaluate and exchange advertising media. In this sense, the issue is treated as an advertising market. This perspective picks up on an address made by William Cook of the Advertising Research Foundation and Arthur Kover, a sociologist at Fordham University, more than a decade ago (1997, p. 13), which I believe is equally relevant today for the field of advertising media purchasing and planning:
“Any discussion of advertising research and measurement of advertising effectiveness needs to consider advertising research as a marketing problem. If marketing is defined as the art of meeting consumers’ needs, advertising effectiveness must be defined in relation to the needs of advertisers. We contend that these needs are quite diverse; we believe that these differing needs reflect important differences in definition among academic and practitioner researchers.”
What Cook and Kover suggested was that in order to bring research on advertising effectiveness forward we should stop chasing one objective definition. Rather, it needed to be recognized that behind parallel definitions of advertising effectiveness by different interest groups – like agency specialists, marketing managers, academics – lay different motives and understandings. In such a view, advertising value, just as related concepts such as ‘media audiences’ are at least in part ‘discursive constructs’ (Dahlgren, 1998, p. 307) that gain their meaning from the practitioner who observes them in time and space.
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6 Figure 1. An advertising market constellation
On the advertising market flourishes a wide range of firms offering their products and services to advertisers. This study departs from the planning processes of the food retailer ICA (described in chapter 2 and 5), a customer and client to some of these firms (Figure 1). Within their marketing departments, advertisers such as ICA develop communication objectives based on their business plans. This could for instance be behavioral goals such as ‘making people visit our stores more frequently’ or cognitive goals such as ‘making people develop more favorable associations to our brand’. In this process of deciding what goals are desirable and which resources are needed to reach the goals, advertisers sometimes draw upon the services of two external suppliers – advertising agencies and the media agencies. Advertising agencies traditionally specialize in transforming business-like communication goals into creative ideas and coordinating the practical execution of the advertisement. ICA’s ad agency additionally holds a central position in the strategic process of developing the underlying communication goals and objectives. The media agency has a more technical approach, translating communication objectives to a media plan saying which budget is needed and where, when, and how many times the advertisements should be distributed in order to reach the goals. Media agencies also take care of the practical administration and handling of the ads, but most of them promote their media buying function and negotiation skills as their core competence. Advertising media is a resource that is often supplied to advertisers by media firms, in this study represented by TV networks and publishing houses.
The bidirectional arrows in Figure 1 indicates that this study in line with a broad stream in contemporary marketing literature regards the advertiser, not as a passive receiver of market offerings from suppliers, but as an active value producer who draws upon resources from a constellation of actors (Normann, 2001). Accordingly, the practitioners at ICA does not consider themselves passively served by suppliers, but rather being the natural captain of the constellation. Their marketing managers are actively attempting to organize practitioners and practices, integrating the resources they provide within ICA’s marketing communications processes. Such a scenario complicates the picture about who produces marketing communications value, who manages the process and who is being managed, and it is within this advertising market
Media firms
Advertiser Agencies
Introduction
context I study how practitioners come to form their understanding of what is valuable and what is not.
The retail firm ICA, like many other advertisers, is experiencing decreasing returns on advertising investments, more market choice and market complexity, yet increasingly wishes to integrate and coordinate its communication efforts. Media firms and agencies are on their side seeing profit margins squeezed, commoditization of products, and standardization of processes. In response to some of the observed problems, suppliers on the advertising market have been advised to make ‘customer value’ more central to their marketing strategies (Aris & Bughin 2005), and specifically a relationship marketing approach has been suggested to assist them in this process (Abratt & Cowan 1999). From this perspective, advertisers, agencies, and media firms all have a shared interest in turning the practice of planning, purchasing and use of media into a more value-oriented exercise, ultimately increasing the advertisers’ experiences of having created effective campaigns. However, the main body of literature on advertising media planning and purchasing still approaches advertising as an optimization problem that does not problematize differences in understandings and procedures among the participants in the process (for an exception see Nyilasy, Kreshel, & Reid, Forthcoming).
A market perspective on advertising media planning addresses some of the problems facing media firms and agencies, as well as advertisers. It challenges the traditional view of how advertising media planning and purchasing should be regarded if advertising media is not to be viewed a product which is supplied, but rather as a bundle of intertwined practices that serves to create advertiser value. Taking a marketing practice perspective on advertising value creation requires us to see advertising as a mutual challenge between buyers and sellers to coordinate procedures and communicate understandings and it is in the interest of this study to uncover how this process works.
A market perspective is generally interesting since it regards the interaction between sellers and buyers as a value creation problem. According to the relational marketing paradigm spearheaded by the so-called Service Dominant Logic (SDL), the customer is claimed to decide what value is, and that value is ultimately created within customers’ processes of usage through collaborative activities with other stakeholders (Vargo & Lusch, 2004). The Service Dominant Logic has over a short period grown immensely popular in its managerial perspective on value creation activity and its marriage between relationship marketing and the resource based-view. The original article by Vargo and Lusch can today pronounce itself the -00 decade’s most cited article in Journal of Marketing according to Google Scholar. Yet, most of the work done so far in this stream is of conceptual rather than empirical character and there are several contributions to make.
Whereas SDL primarily focuses on how value is created, there are parallel streams in marketing that pay more interest in how value is understood. Research in the cognitive stream (e.g. Woodruff, 1997) has attempted to outline
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the structure and dimension of customer-perceived value. In the domain of interpretive marketing studies, consumption has been depicted as a practice that is culturally contingent (Arnould & Thompson, 2005). From this perspective value creation can be understood only if we also regard the contextual understandings and conventions that guard the usage processes.
Though SDL proposes that value is mainly created by customers, there are few empirical descriptions of what customers actually do, and it has been claimed that SDL alone lacks the tools to really systematize such knowledge (Schau, Muñiz, & Arnould, 2009). Little is known about how these processes work across organizational boundaries (Payne, Storbacka, & Frow, 2008), and perhaps most importantly it is not extensively studied how practitioners come to understand value within marketing relationships (Grönroos, 2007, p. 177). The effort to study value creation as a social process seems a fruitful path for me to approach this problem.
1.4 Research objective
This study picks up on the remarks made by Dahlgren (1998) and Cook and Kover (1997), that much of what is described as ‘value’ are highly contextual understandings that often co-exist in parallel to each other. Leaving aside that an advertising planner, a politician, and a media studies scholar, who will never ever meet, might see value in entirely different dimensions of the behaviors of a national TV audience, I was curious how firms and practitioners who are supposed to co-create value through everyday work practices in interconnected market constellations construct their ideas about value.
A marketing communications process at a large food retail firm such as ICA combines practices conducted by a number of practitioners both internal and external to the organization. Just as this process serves to produce what theories like the Service Dominant Logic calls ‘customer value’, it seems unlikely that customer value as a concept is constructed by the customer (in this case ICA) alone. Thereby marketing communications is also a process in which different practitioners with different frames of reference meet and somehow agrees on what should be regarded valuable. Theories on value co-creation are at least to a certain extent dependent on that understandings about value are shared and it is this value formation process that I aim to explore. The dynamics are demonstrated in a study where we get to follow ICA’s advertising planning process and the actions and interactions of marketing managers, consultants and suppliers of advertising media.
The purpose is to create an empirically grounded description of the value formation process.
Introduction
‘Value formation’ is a term used by Grönroos (2007, p. 360) to describe the creation of value that is less determined in advance1. Working from the
propositions of Practice Theory, it is here suggested that the concept of value formation can be broken down in two intertwined processes – value creation which refers to the activities that actors engage in, and value construction which refers to practitioners’ understandings of value. Inquiries about the latter has been largely absent from the academic discussion on value creation in marketing, why we know very little about the dynamics of value and how mind and action are combined.
Figure 2 Value formation, creation and construction
By looking at value formation as a social process means that, as opposed to much of the existing advertising literature which is free from people and where value often is portrayed to exist independent of human action, this study contrarily claims that in research on value the people – here practitioners - are central. Understandings of value and procedures to create value are parts of the everyday job people perform on social arenas. Taking this perspective on value creation may help to understand why media firms encounter difficulties in improving the creation of customer value, and why advertisers find it difficult to coordinate value creation across departments and professional communities in the market constellation. Most centrally it provides a perspective on value formation where managing the meanings of value may be as important as the physical acts of value creation.
Two research questions are developed to help design the research strategy and guide methodological considerations. The first question focuses on how practitioners articulate value and in what ways these views differ across communities of practice (addressed in chapter 9). The second question looks deeper into how the social construction of value is contingent on practices (addressed in chapter 10).
1 Grönroos distinguishes planned (value generation) from less determined (value formation) value
creation processes
Value formation
Value creation (Action) Value construction (Understanding)Jönköping International Business School
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RQ1: How do different practitioners in the media planning and purchasing process understand value?
RQ2: How do those understandings form within professional practices?
1.5 Outline of the thesis
Chapter 1, Introduction, provides the background to the study, its objective and research questions. The social dynamics of customer value are placed at the core of the study, which is further positioned within the fields of marketing and advertising. A brief textual overview of the report is provided.
Chapter 2, Methodology, introduces the research strategy of the thesis and how social theory on practices has influenced the design of the study. It is argued with the support of social theories on practice that studying why people do things the way they do may provide new insights into how value is formed.
Chapter 3, Value formation in marketing literature provides a brief historical overview of value creation theory and introduces three approaches to value and value creation – the resource-based view, the cognitive view, and the interpretive view. In each view it asks how existing knowledge relates to the issue of value as social constructions. Special interest is taken in services marketing thinking which has developed a special focus on customers’ consumption processes, and value creation as an interplay between buyer and seller, blurring the demarcation between producer and consumer.
Chapter 4, Value in advertising theory delves into more industry-specific literature. Since the empirical setting of this study is the advertising industry, it was of interest to see how value is described and analyzed in advertising literature and trade press. This was a way to understand the role of academic theory in the practices that the practitioners were performing, but also a way to be more familiar with the current debate and questions in the field. TV advertising planning, Custom publishing, and Customer Relationship Management are all professional and academic areas in their own rights and much of the established concepts, tools, and models that occur in industry jargon are presented and structured here. The chapter is structured in sections covering how literature describes value relating to each of these three professionalized fields. Each section is, to the extent possible, classifying research that has studied value from as either objective or subjective constructs. In the later sections, the concept of value is broadened to also include general aspects work processes and relationships.
The case descriptions in chapters 5 through 8 introduce the case company ICA, and their communications planning processes. It then moves on to the rich details of each of the three in-cases – TV advertising, Custom publishing, and Customer relationship management providing an overview of the work that was conducted and the decisions that were taken. These stories provide a
Introduction
process dimension of the actions and interactions taking place and show an overview of the context in which value is constructed.
Chapter 9, How practitioners articulate the value of using advertising media, should be regarded as another perspective on the empirical data. Through coding of in-depth interviews in search of how each practitioner articulated value, a value palette for each studied community of practice emerged. It is not meant as an absolute measurement of what value is, but it provides an opportunity to identify differences in how value is understood across cases and fields of practice.
Chapter 10, The practical logic of value, brings together the contextual descriptions of process activities in chapters 5 to 8, and the value articulations identified in chapter 9, and returns to the coded in-depth interviews in search of mechanisms of underlying practioners’ articulations. For each of the three cases – TV advertising, Custom publishing, and Customer relationship management, the contextual logics of value are described. The result is an identification and description of 16 value forming practices.
Chapter 11, Conclusions, discusses the dynamics involved in the construction of value. By adding dimensions to the current understanding of value creation, it reflects on the contributions to marketing theory in general, but also to the understanding of marketing communication and advertising.
2
Methodology
2.1 Research Strategy
When designing this study, I scanned through what felt like never-ending piles of articles and books on audience measurement and media selection. What struck me was that anything that had to do with valuation or value creation seemingly looked the same. One quantitative survey after another was scoring the relative importance of fixed lists of media characteristics in different target groups: large advertisers, small advertisers, and media agency professionals with low or high education. Yet none of the studies appeared to reflect over the alarming detail that while respondents assigned a factor with importance, the same category of people voiced in other forums that the most ‘important’ factors also said very little about the value of the product. Then why is it so – is value not important, or are items of importance not valuable? It seemed as if media selection was not quite the rational decimal science it pretended to be.
2.1.1 (Re-)Interpreting media valuation practices
So in addition to my earlier experiences, this research came about also as a reaction to the uniformity of prior studies. I wanted it to go beyond the surface of media planning and purchasing practice and show the complexity of how things happen the way they do. The result should among other things serve to illustrate why high importance and low value may be attributed to the same media selection methods.
The only way that seemed feasible to approach this was through an interpretive approach, and to ‘see the situation as it is seen by the actor, observing what the actor takes into account, observing how he interprets what is taken into account’ (Blumer, 1969, p. 56). Understanding therefore becomes central, as opposed to research that have the objectives to make predictions based on theory. In this study, the desire to expand understanding rather than test theory fits well with this approach. As Braa and Vidgen (1999), suggests, the interpretive case study may be provide one of the most distinct ways to implement such research objectives. Following real life marketing communications practices appeared as choice that fitted well into this framework.
2.1.2 The case study approach
A case study is not a method in itself, but rather a ‘research strategy’ or a way to approach what goes on in particular settings (Eisenhardt, 1989, p. 534). I found
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the case approach suitable for mainly two reasons. On the technical side, it allowed me to study different media channels, where the case context – a specific process, at a specific firm, at a specific duration in time – formed the anchor that made comparison across media campaigns easier. This need to acknowledge the context of study, and the contextuality of findings, has been voiced in some academic circles (e.g. Pettigrew, 1987), yet has passed relatively unnoticed in research on advertising and media. Further, the format allowed me to leverage the strengths of qualitative data by presenting the work along a story line with details, scenes and conversations that made the setting come alive (Caulley, 2008). The case approach simply assists telling a story, and a good story is central to the case approach (Dyer & Wilkins, 1991; Eisenhardt, 1991).
In a case study, the investigated phenomenon and the context in which it occurs are often ‘intertwined’ (Pettigrew, 1987; Yin, 1994, p. 13). Because of this contextuality, the case study becomes a description of something very ‘particular’ (Stake, 2000, p. 436). Defining the case too clearly in advance does not, however, come without criticism. From an interpretive standpoint, pre-defining the object of study may be counterproductive to the whole research purpose. The method itself embraces ambiguity in the research setting and in order ‘to be determinate we must be indeterminate’ (Van Maanen, 1995, p. 139). As Charles Ragin (1992, p. 6) recapitulates from a discussion with Howard Becker; ‘Strong preconceptions (about what the case is) are likely to hamper conceptual development. Researchers probably will not know what their cases are until the research, including the task of wiring up the results, is virtually completed. What it is a case of will coalesce gradually, sometimes catalytically, and the final realization of the case’s nature may be the most important part of the interaction between ideas and evidence’. The less sure researchers are of the nature of their case, they argue, the better their research may be.
Bearing this in mind, the detailed definition of the case becomes a central part of the research process. From my perspective I have for practical reasons limited the definition of the case to simply setting the case boundaries of the study, leaving for my interpretation to fill this empty shell with content. Here, I have departed from the conventionalized definition in social science, that ‘boundaries around places and time periods define cases’ (Ragin, 1992, p. 5). Defining the case as a marketing communications planning cycle at a specific firm at a specific period in time makes the study manageable in time and space. The interpretive challenge has been to uncover the contents of the studied case and to understand and describe their meaning.
While the marketing communications process on the one hand is used to define the investigated case, my interpretive work also involves using my collected empirical data to question and elaborate this concept. Theoretical conceptions about what communications planning and media purchasing is presumed to be are here laid aside and instead the phenomenon is built inductively through interviews and observations throughout the study. Place,
Methodology
time, and space are here predefined, but what there occurs – how, why, and by whom – is left open to elaboration in the study. The case construct is therefore not treated as a generalized and objective phenomenon that is in no need of further definition. Rather as Harper (1992) suggests, essentially the case itself is ‘found’ in the empirical data by uncovering its sociologically meaningful boundaries and by displaying the complex underlying social processes.
2.1.3 Generating answers from cases
When I seek to find how value is formed in marketing communications practices, I study what people do and say and interpret what these actions and articulations mean. However, this interpretation is inevitably coloured by my prior knowledge and experiences of the empirical and theoretical topic, expressed through my research questions and my ideas about possible outcomes of the project. Pettigrew (1997, p. 343) argues that research on phenomena that occur over time, ‘is best characterized as cycles of deduction and induction’. The researcher moves back and forth between theory-building and interpretation based on existing theory. In this study the empirical problem of assessing value formation within marketing communications processes was identified through pre-studies and articles in trade press. This was then mirrored against strengths and weaknesses of existing theory on media selection and value creation in order to crystallize research themes and questions. However, this deductive way to structure research is ‘only a prelude to a more open-ended process of inductive reasoning and pattern recognition’ (Pettigrew, 1997, p. 344). From this point of view, the initial core question only formed the starting point from where additional themes and questions were added as patterns emerged through the empirical material. As more specific examples were added to the research design, allowing comparisons across examples, themes and questions could yet again be re-interpreted and reformulated. The challenge in this iterative process is to be enough creative to spot new patterns, new explanations, and new ways to formulate what occurs in the setting of the case.
The aim is to build new theory where most studies seem to be stuck in old wheel-tracks. My position here subscribes to Glaser & Strauss’ (1967) ideas of ‘fit’. If a new theory is aimed to readily fit the studied data, then systematic discovery of theory from data appears to be the most suitable way to make sure that this actually happens (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). While discovery sounds simple enough, as Glaser (1998, p. 81) states, ‘it is the nature of man to force data’. One of the great challenges of interpretive research is to resist the urge to force data to fit preconceptions about theory or practice, but rather let this particular interpretation of media planning and buying emerge as freely as possible from the material.
What is described by the researcher should be real and comprehensible enough to make sense to the persons being studied as well as other
